About 200 policemen stormed government offices in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah on Monday to protest at the failure of the Palestinian Authority to fight growing lawlessness, witnesses said. The incident was the latest sign of chaos in Gaza, which has suffered growing internal unrest since Israel withdrew last September after 38 years of occupation.Firing into the air as they ran through the streets, the policemen raided government offices, courthouses, an election office and the municipality building in Rafah.They smashed windows at the Interior Ministry building and forced the staff to leave.The number of police taking part in the protest swelled to some 200 officers, most of them armed, who forcibly shut down one government building after the other.... http://news.yahoo.com

Britain has dropped its allegation that Iran has been supplying extremist groups in southern Iraq with bombs. After a thorough assessment of the latest intelligence, military and diplomatic officials have stopped pointing the finger at Tehran, merely saying that the new technology matched bomb-making expertise traditionally found in Syria and Lebanon. The roadside explosive devices at the centre of the allegation have an infra-red triggering system and have killed ten British soldiers since the beginning of May. ...http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,170-1966498,00.html

Heavy snow and rain over the weekend in Pakistan's northern region disrupted relief efforts to an estimated three million survivors of the country's Oct. 8 earthquake, and similar conditions threaten operations this week. ``More rain and snow is predicted during next 36 hours'' in the quake region, the Islamabad-based Pakistan Meteorological Department said in a statement on its Web site yesterday. A strong weather system is producing widespread rain and snow above 1,200 meters (4,000 feet), it said. An international relief operation is trying to aid the survivors left homeless by the 7.6 magnitude quake that killed 73,331 people in the Pakistan-administered region of Kashmir and North West Frontier province and more than 1,200 people on the Indian side of Kashmir. The winter season lasts until March in Pakistan's quake region. ...http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=aHkABjXKyqTQ&refer=home

Prosecutors in southern Italy were yesterday facing the prospect of reopening long-closed cases after a serial killer confessed to committing three murders for which other people are already in jail.A local newspaper in Puglia published on Saturday a letter from the "little old lady killer", Ezzedine Sebai ben Mohammed, confessing to the three killings.Sebai, 41, is serving four life sentences after terrorising elderly women in Puglia and neighbouring Basilicata in the mid-1990s. The Tunisian national was arrested in 1997 for the murder of 75-year-old Lucia Nico. From the outset, he was suspected of being a serial killer. A search of his home turned up a ring and watch belonging to two other murdered pensioners. Eventually the courts decided he had struck at least five times, wounding one victim and killing the others. But in a letter to the Voce del Popolo, Sebai said he wanted to free the prisoners currently in jail....http://www.guardian.co.uk/italy/story/0,12576,1676517,00.html

Wildlife officers shot 41 pilot whales that beached on New Zealand's South Island, the Department of Conservation said. A total of 49 whales came ashore Saturday near Farewell Spit in the second major stranding in the area within two weeks. Eight died on the beaches, and the remaining animals were shot when heavy seas prevented any attempt to refloat them. "Given the hopelessness of being able to successfully refloat the whales, our prime concern was then to avoid the whales' suffering a long and painful death," Greg Napp, the department's Golden Bay area officer, said in a statement. Napp said the latest stranding was likely unconnected to another last month when 129 pilot whales came ashore close by. ...http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=1461661

Israel is considering lodging a vehement protest after the BBC airs a national program Sun about the country's nuclear program, dubbed "Israel's secret weapon." The program reportedly examines the "double standard" of the international community with regard to Israel's and Iraq's unconventional weapons. The program allegedly claims the army used some form of unidentified chemical weapons against Palestinians in Feb 2001. It focuses on efforts made by Israel to cover up its development of unconventional weapons, among other things referring to Mordechai Vanunu, serving an 18-year term for passing information about Israel's nuclear program in Dimona to a British newspaper, and the trial of Brig. Gen. (res.) Yitzhak Yoav, who was convicted of showing two unpublished book manuscripts, one fictional and the other a memoir, to unauthorized people. The producers tried to meet with former workers from the Dimona nuclear reactor who in the past claimed they fell ill as a result of their work...http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=273071&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y